Naphthalene
Pleasure and Progress--Chapter 6
Tom Bass
Wyatt’s traveling light and his emotions are no bigger than his boots burying down into the worn carpet of the creaking Douglas gliding into the green lights of Benghazi. He hasn’t bothered with the time bonus allotted by Poseidon Oil and Gas to come to terms with his downward spiraling feelings about his wife and son deposited in England. He admits he’d rather use his last days going after Colonel Candy’s big dynamic play.
He can’t decipher the graffiti scrawled on his gate. Hostile, he guesses, judging from the colophon: a scimitar dripping with black blood under the Arabic glyph. The driveway’s sticky with bomblets of dates and the shrapnel of pomegranates. The rotten fruit smells alcoholic, illicit.
Wyatt screws at the fuses mounted on one wall of the house. A small dune of sand slopes at the foot of the front door, his key crunches in the sandy lock, and the Benghazi house flickers to life on low battery. He ducks in, fumbles for the switches on the walls, the temporary maladjustment of moving from one place to another.
Wyatt peruses the sad, silent house colonized by sand but weirdly free of scorpions, snakes or spiders. The grit gnaws at his bare soft feet released from the sauna of the boots in which he had traveled for two days. Nonetheless, he’s rejuvenated to be back, happy to have skipped London and his monster-in-law. Yes, Wyatt has returned to Libya full of brawn, excited by the prospect of his great gamble, yet just shrewd enough to be worried about the phlegmatic politics of Colonel Candy.
He deserves congratulations in a way. He fells the occupiers one after another: Italians, Jews, Americans, and British, all exorcized by the political voodoo of his loony regime and filling the souks with their unwanted belongings. Candy beats his hairy silver chest and his rhetoric rebounds across the great oil drum of the region. His voice carries across the Sahara, slips through the bush of the Sahel, and arrives with vigor in the tropics.
Young ambitious men answer back, electrified by an odd-shaped ball of postcolonial independence that they sew from rubber and fiber and fill with spongy bullets. It passes from throne to prison, from stool to barracks, everyone trying to hang on, as erratic and unpredictable as its secret master, Candy. Without judging who’s Mandela or Amin, Candy is helping his proxies’ struggles across the continent. He has no qualms honoring awful men.
Keen to display his power, he hosts the Arab Summit in Tripoli and Candy’s obliged to appear as larger-than-life, with a cache of victories against the scourge of the capitalists. He introduces a Suez Tax on oil shipments, dents Poseidon’s revenues, and talks about an oil embargo. He suggests annexing Egypt in brotherly union and has invited the Russians to take over the American and British bases. To prove the point of what he can achieve, Candy has driven through a Poseidon housing estate in a tank. Yet he can’t be too wild; he still has Poseidon to thank for his treasury, and its employees like Wyatt, who inappropriately and mistakenly believing he’s essential to the geopolitical drama, though he’s unsure of exactly for whom.
Wyatt’s a fool and he’s cemented in place, just like the wells flowing in the desert that threaten to strangle not only Libya with their riches but a vast swath of the continent with an easy, sick death.
Sand has choked the house in his absence, coated the furniture, embedded in the carpet, duned on the window sills, impregnated the wardrobes and cabinets, seemingly migrated everywhere as if a gas. He needs a practical cleaner, but he doesn’t want a woman in the house, more than likely the shape of a melon and with a mouth full of moss, but someone who lives like him, on boiled eggs, ketchup, and chopped onions.
Is his indispensable odd-job man Battutu alive?
And would Battutu be willing to come back?
Wyatt steps into his study to scrutinize his papers and maps. Somehow he has forgotten about the objects, violent or ordinary, that are a crystallization of the little disposable time he allows himself when not in Poseidon’s oil fields. The enameled cement floor’s covered by a rug of running gazelles and the room’s decorated with his refined taste in junk: the skull of an oryx, a prize shot in the desert, a curved dagger with a rhino horn handle, coffee grinders, a spent belt of English anti-aircraft shells, a brass ship’s bell, a brace of Arab powder and ball pistols inlaid with ivory, a ship’s compass, a Rommel corps bayonet, ropes of copper keys from the size of a pea to a loaf, Bedouin camel bags swinging from the back of the door, a dented crescent weathervane from a mosque propped in one corner, a slab of red rock chiseled with a prehistoric petroglyph of hippo perched in another, the tattered fin of an American bomber, and a group of kerosene lamps, the smell of evaporated fuel heady and refreshing, on top of a seafarer’s chest marked in black paint with ports of departure and arrival, Liverpool to Hong Kong, somehow stranded halfway, much like Wyatt.
Desperately inert since the trip to Goshen, his proboscis needs stoking.
He studies the drafting table, a mundane but practical affair recycled from Poseidon’s head office probably reduced to skeleton staff. He has no ingenious method to hide the sum of educated guesses sketched on his maps, the plans for a munificent Royal Baby, the living jelly of his ambitions surpass the dirt and chores of his childhood and be a wheeler-dealer.
The pyramid of rolls are in order. He’s set a little trap, draped four of Noemi’s thin black hairs over the pile, and nothing’s disturbed. Without hesitation, he unrolls them, weighs down their corners with sandstone specimens stained with oil. Wyatt slips off his cramped ivory jeans, lifts himself onto the stool, and in one callisthenic movement he crawls onto the table, lowering his nose ever so daintily to the surface of a waxy map, his rump teeter-tottering into the air.
He scratches at Sudan. He pokes at the Central African Republic. He rubs Chad. He plunges his nose into the proven Libyan reserves. Nothing. Not a drop. Not an iota in his detector.
Has his uncanny sense of smell perished?
He sniffs over certainties: Persian Gulf, Arabia, Niger Delta, jumps across the Atlantic to Brazil, then the Gulf of Mexico.
Nothing exudes from the collection. Or less: negative absolute Kelvin.
Large and tumescent, it looms in his mind like a shape with no center and no end, a doughnut.
The maps are blanks and questions whirl in a panic about the slush of his mind. Are these the originals? They certainly appear to be: those are his stickers of dots and dashes where he remembers placing them. Is there something that he isn’t seeing? Something that is there yet invisible? Is Royal Baby merely a pedestrian child, of no special value at all?
He drinks in the air, redolent of mice and dust, and lowers himself, probes the maps again, counting on a deep breath to solve the conundrum. Is his hunch that misplaced? What’s happened? Did he overexpose his nasal appetite? Was he rushing forward too quickly? Did he need sex? Or whiskey? What’s jamming the signals? Should he need to heat the maps up? What rat has betrayed him?
Noemi?
In order to get out?
Wyatt clambers down, unnerved by the failure of his hound and the paranoia exposed beneath his struggle. Fatigue courses through his body, hardening. He treads down the tiled hall to the kitchen and burrows for the whiskey stashed under the sink. He pours a drink and doesn’t bother to sit, not after three days of propellers and bucket seats. He goes to the bedroom and cracks the Samsonite, unpacks the new duds from Talberts, the black boot-cut jeans, the black paisley shirts sewn with white thread and gussied up with rhinestone buttons, and a pair of shimmering black boots. Hardly a traditionalist, but appreciative of the courtly ways of the cowboy, he’s bound to respect the mourning period after the death of his father. He spreads the duds out on the bed that was all his now, his concerns drifting back to Noemi, adamant and pampering herself in London as compensation for her trials in America. Not caring a fig, he guesses as he removes the black outfit to the dusty wardrobe, tosses them among the officious English suits and rodeo regalia, then diving onto the sandy bed, ribbons of fine grit rising around him. He rinses down the last gulp and soon his body makes a putty of sweat and powder.
Wyatt woke with the calls, the holy lyrics wrapping around the neighborhood. Motes of wandering, homeless, almost static sand glow in the light, low and brown, ineffable and indistinct. He’s covered in it.
Standing at the kitchen sink, trying to prepare a coffee before anything else, a cheroot dangling dangerously from his lips, his throat slimy with catarrh, he finds the water loaded with sand. He puts the pot on the stove anyway and swivels the valve on the gas canister.
“Gravity, you sort it out,” he says.
Silicon and quartz has been a vital part of his diet in the desert, as good as cereal almost.
He’s forgotten about the company radio stuck like a wart on the kitchen shelf. It glows forbiddingly when he switches it on.
“Sugar 2,” he says into the microphone, his voice filled with unease. “Sugar 2? Read me, Sugar 1? Roger?”
The message fizzles into nowhere.
The sand’s still suspended in the atmosphere and occupying any space in the ether reserved for radio waves. He’ll have to tramp if he wants any sugar.
Wyatt rushes through his ablutions, abrading more than shaving, slipping on his wrinkled black outfit, stirring the coffee into the boiled sand.
He hardly bothers for the grounds and grains to settle, bolts back the turgid mix, marches to the garage through the drifts, chokes the Beetle and leaves it to warm up, picking up a sandy cluster of dates as he goes back into the house. He peeks at his study, wipes the sweat from his face, remembering how his nose has failed. But he plunks his hat on his head, nonetheless determined, and fills his chest pocket with pencils, grabs his briefcase, fastens a handkerchief over his face and locks. Wyatt pulls apart the gates, reverses the dune buggy, stops at the curb, pulls them shut, drags his goggles over his hat and eyes, registers the two policemen standing to the side of the property in the haze of the sand storm. They whisper to themselves, playing the game of never looking at their subject, though it’s obvious they’re here to report on the cowboy in black on a spree.
He grunts and speeds off, turns on the headlights halfway down the lane, not sure exactly where he’s going or what he’s doing. He’d have to choose between Poseidon or Ali Baba. He laughs. He’s nearly forgotten the oath to be an informant—a “consultant” as Candy had labeled Wyatt’s gopher-like role.
The low visibility didn’t disturb anyone, certainly not anyone endowed with a turban or veil to draw across their eyes. Mint sellers peddle through the streets. Carts of melons and potatoes are parked along the boulevard. Taxis wait in neat ranks. To Wyatt, paranoid yet confident, it seems that his suspicion is correct: most everyone is a spy for Candy’s multi-departmental security apparatus designed to root out foreign influence. The sense of surveillance definitely is not alleviated by colossal plywood cut-outs left along the boulevards since the Arab League Summit: Sadat, Nasser, Arafat, Hussein, Assad, and those presidents from the Sahel whose names tripped him up like Haile Miriam, all of them magnificent in their suits and robes, bestowing good blessings and bloody threats upon the Arab people cowering below, most of all Candy, at the center of the Arab universe and rendered like Gargantua, bloated in scale and magnificence, dwarfing his peers, even the sun, an ominous stained outline in the roiling brown sky.
Security must have eased, Wyatt guesses, not having to stop at a single checkpoint on his way to the ministry. He’s thankful, as it occurs to him that the gun might be in the glove box, which he stretches to open and confirms: the pistol nearly rusted and useless, rescued with oil, grease, and a clean, but a gun nonetheless, incriminating and easily misunderstood. He has been careless and the worry teases him as he drives under the hollow shadows of the construction booming from the ruins of Carthage’s satellite kingdom. But Wyatt’s preoccupied, ominously thinking of the horrible day at the beach when he and his son nearly drowned, which is probably why he’s doing this anyway. Nonetheless, he notes with some irony that the workers aren’t Arabs but Blacks. Wyatt supposes Candy has ordered the Libyans not to work, such is the ruler’s confidence in the oil economy.
He drums his thumbs on the wheel, thrilled to be doing something. His energy surges back, in large part thanks to the cigarettes and coffee, but he feels a bit cocky again.
Wyatt wouldn’t have to go far for Ali Baba, who is far closer than he ever imagines.
He’s greeted by a sterling act of provocation. In his absence, Libya’s National Oil Corporation has erected a new headquarters of glass and steel next to what’s left of Poseidon Oil and Gas. The workers appear to be finishing the top floors, significantly taller than Poseidon’s squat sponge of a building.
Wyatt grins, and then hoots in the car, cackling maniacally, the laughter pushing his hat off such is his sick joy. Why didn’t Candy occupy Poseidon immediately upon declaring the nationalization program? Wyatt presumes that skullduggery at this level requires a sophistication and authority of which he couldn’t really conceive. But why pretend to negotiate, when you could holster a six-shooter to your waist and solve the dispute in the street? Is not Candy the sheriff and Poseidon no more than bandit vermin? Or the other way round? And who’s Wyatt?
He couldn’t tell.
The trident flag hangs flaccidly, impotent and bleached.
“Sugar 1,” he says to himself melodiously as he walks into Poseidon’s reception, his kerchief pulled down his neck, goggles pushed over the bowl of his hat, his new black boots crunching on the marble floor, half-expecting the famous Scot red head, her cleavage, incredible bum, the come-hither toss of her hair.
But for the first time ever, it’s a man, and a Libyan at that.
“Mister Pleasure,” he says, hiding his disappointment, for the Scot had been the absolute pick from his crop of louche company dates with big bums and easy ways; fornication overseas was Poseidon’s way of life. “I’ve an appointment with Dr. Ali Baba.”
The clerk’s hand creaks across the register. No cheeky repartee or clash of eyes, just a narcotic-like silence that dwindles into the oscillating fans, Wyatt coolly waits, afraid and brash, adrenalin scattering in his limbs, accustomed to days of delays, noticing the man’s lapel, dotted with a very familiar, grinning enamel pin.
Oh, Candy’s cool and smooth, a deposit of nefarious sublimating ice in the oil economy’s favorite cocktail. So drunk are his customers by the end of Libyan happy hour that they can’t fathom how he’s stolen their currency, their women, their dignity and honor, their property, and if they aren’t very careful, their lives. In fact, they will thank him, for graciously continuing to make more rounds of lovely viscous flammable drinks. The secret of theft on this scale or any scale: just smile and no one will notice. Candy has absolute foresight as the best and most malignant of witchdoctors melting time and belief together.
Like in the past, the doors swing easily.
Ali Baba shifts his hulk in a leather chair. He sweeps back his hair then extends his tubby hand. A roughly cut mustache squats under his fleshy nose.
“Very nice office, don’t you think?” he says, zest in his voice, savoring the leather chair and broad expanse of desk.
“Sure,” Wyatt says.
Ali Baba’s shirt is decorated with golden gushing derricks and gathered in knots. He troubles the buttons of his jacket and his trousers are too trim for a man of his girth, wedged open obscenely at the zipper. He’s a slob and supposedly a friend.
“Are you Mr. Wyatt, the cowboy?”
“The one and only,” he says. Could he be anyone else but the cowboy dressed for this rodeo, sitting in the gate on the back of this blue bull, praying to Allah to qualify, maybe even win, with just nine seconds to beat the beast and win the belt?
“That right?” Ali Baba admires the buff black-robed American, so virile and healthy.
“I never rope or drive cows,” Wyatt says, “So technically I’m not a cowboy at all.”
Ali’s globular ears are more like chalices than organs and he expects to hear good results, not lies.
“But you’re good with a lasso, no?”
Did he detect an inflection of Russian in the man’s accent, treacly and crude?
“Didn’t you light the airfield with flares and get the plane down to keep your best driller alive?”
“That was one hell of a night.”
“You also have some babies, if my sources are correct.”
Wyatt pats his quiver of maps. “Sure, I like making babies.”
“Now Wyatt, you can’t provoke me with your vulgarity. I’m an Armenian refugee from Palestine, a Christian like you, your brother and your friend.”
“Baku Oil Academy, would that be right?”
“Very astute, Mr. Wyatt. You read some Russian?”
“No, but that’s the most famous school of them all, the granddaddy if you’re going to be a petroleum geologist. Lots of your countrymen are running the show offshore of California and Texas.”
“You don’t say?”
“And if it helps, my great-grandmother was, if I recall, a Divan.”
“Armenians are hardworking.”
“Who knows where we come from, Ali—a couch or an ottoman, eh?”
Ali Baba brushes aside the innuendo and the impulse to laugh. “Well, see, there’s no excuse that we can’t get along, no barriers at all, Mr. Wyatt. Nothing to fear. The Mamaluk’s have been vanquished. And the Ottomans are in retreat. Now only the Jews we have to fear in Jerusalem.”
“If you say.” The man’s unkempt appearance is a ruse, a cultivated bureaucratic disguise, a cover of incompetence, though he’s clever and about as trustworthy as an ill-tempered mule.
“Mr. Wyatt, you have a proposal for Libyan National Oil Corporation?”
“Isn’t this Poseidon Oil and Gas?”
“Times have changed, Mr. Wyatt, I’m sure you’ll acknowledge that. You don’t happen to remember people before profits?”
“I’d have to check with my superiors.”
“I’m your superior,” Ali says, glowering, clenching his teeth, his mouth squeaking like a vice.
“Looks like it’s sewn up then and the baby’s just another doll.”
“Why wouldn’t one monopoly replace another, hmm?”
“Good point. But it’s very un-American.”
“Mr. Wyatt, think about what you proposed to our most imminent brother if you want to talk about patriotism. I would suggest you relax in the meantime. The fields are working just fine without you. As you can see the revolution is almost complete. Only the people’s committees are as yet unmade.”
“Isn’t ‘relax’ a foreign word?”
“How do you say? Kill some time, yes? In our wonderful city of Benghazi.”
“I’m taken off the case?”
“I want you to reconsider. You’ll get a retainer for your administrative leave of course. Think of yourself as underemployed.”
“Without me, you’ve nothing.”
“There you’re wrong, Mr. Wyatt. Now, if you’re going to waste my time, I’ll have to excuse you.”
“Dr. Baba, don’t you want to see my maps?”
“No, Wyatt,” he says, his tone stretched of patience.
“You see it’s my nose…. My honker is out of whack. I can’t find Royal Baby without it.”
“Imagine, Wyatt, there’s a wonderful spa in Azerbaijan, where the patients soak in tubs of naphthalene. Cures everything, especially the nose. If you’re as enterprising as rumored, and with so much free time, try it at home. We’ll radio you once you’re all fixed. You can go.”
“Yes, Dr. Baba, I’ll expect your call. ”
He’s being cut off, quite rudely sliced off from the mother corporation without so much a word of warning! It’s sobering. Abandoned. Orphaned. Discarded in the reeds, without a raft and without a god, he’s just one more pawn to be sacrificed to a great strategy.
Wyatt slumps into his car.
What a blow. If he hasn’t been outright dismissed, he’s at least been put on hold. They know. So what that he’s never been careless or carefree with his plans. They’ve managed to turn off the spigot to his very own nose, his dowser and detector rolled into one. Candy’s far too intelligent and Wyatt must have grossly underestimated the man. Inadvertently, he’s boasted about his secret without even naming his price. Most infuriating is Baba Ali, so miserable in his appearance, who commandeered the meeting with such apparent rank. The tables have turned every which way but in his favor. There are no familiar colleagues to query him about his trip home, the reason for his black clothes, the health of his son, about whom he had been looking forward to sharing a joke. No, he’s just another parasite riding on the supply side and he feels awful.
With Noemi nursing in London, he doesn’t have much to do at home and restlessness tears him apart. He has no business living in his pajamas like a Libyan, tooting a hookah and making eyes, rubbing his worry beads, a coffee and pastry on his table under the awning of his local café at his station on the cushions and daybed. Yet it wouldn’t be the first time to be a bachelor again, under self-imposed house arrest. The police or their spies surely rest on the other side, the register of their conversation passing over the wall, but that’s nothing to fret about. Wyatt’s benign, harmless, no more trouble than a worm.
Dressed in a threadbare cowboy shirt and dirty jeans tucked into his stockman’s boots, depressed, native as far as the growth of his beard, ennui prevails in his half-hearted quest for order. His orders to a local boy are chopped up in half-words passing through the iron slot in the gate where he pays a few piasters extra for kebabs, pitas and tobacco. He accepts them with no guarantees of oleander, datura or other malicious seeds of witchcraft being sewn in the deliveries. Wyatt suspects he’s immune to hocus-pocus.
He busies himself cleaning but it’s inconsequential. Sandy funnel clouds rule in the colonial house. Attempts to dust and polish are investments in wasting time. The sand multiplies and returns, as his attention turns to the outer premises. Hidden by a cinderblock wall, its top covered in mortar spiked with broken glass, he takes off his shirt and mows then fertilizes the lawn; he scours the driveway of the fruity detritus until the concrete glistens. Improvising a harness, he prunes the date palms of their fruits and dead fronds, and for a diversion makes syrup from the ripest pomegranates and the mangos are also within reach.
Later, breaking for coffee and a cavalcade of smokes, he drafts a report to the London office, but in the intermittent days he doesn’t bother to send it such is his malaise and belief it’ll be intercepted. Instead, he waits for news, a wire or the blissful call over the CB radio, but nothing, no post at all, no messages in the information blackout. The airwaves, like the phone, are dead, except for the chanting of the muezzin and the rhetoric of Colonel Candy stirring the miasma of intrigue. He frets: did no one care? What has happened to Poseidon? Has the great god of oil been wrestled to the ground and suffocated in Candy’s clutches?
He has zero to lose.
With the help of an oil merchant, contacted through an obsequious series of notes dispatched to the souks, he procures a barrel of crude, 64 gallons of sweet oil. An Arab delivers it at dawn in a beat up barrel sprayed with the Poseidon logo, the man’s donkey wheezing and trembling outside Wyatt’s gate as the barrel is rolled into his compound.
Once he’s taken the delivery, Wyatt revisits his study, but there is no scent lingering among the maps, just the flat inertness of mites, skin and dirt. He considers that hardly noticeable trace of ions an achievement. But the search in his reference books has cast a large amount of doubt on the resemblance of Libyan crude to the magic Azeri substance. He sighs. Even without the exact recipe for naphthalene, he was willing to try any goop of Ali Baba’s persuasion.
After spreading a tarp across the lawn and dragging his bathing vessel into place, Wyatt leans the barrel toward the bathtub scavenged from a defunct Italian Hotel. The liquid’s glassy black yet not black at all, rather blue, then red and green simultaneously, nearly brown, but then also yellow, golden, like a bruise, a very emotional color filled with undecipherable tidings. He leaves the black bath to warm in the sun.
Wyatt searches in the garage among his tools for a pair of torn jockey shorts nominally used for polishing tarnished brass and he wrestles them on. Without an attendant in the bathing area, his temporary Baku, he arranges a flask of turpentine, a covey of brushes and some torn drop sheets around the area, in addition to a little footstool and a new bar of olive soap. With a caution bordering on tenderness, he dipped a toe into the liquid, thinner than he imagines, tepid, not nearly as viscous as what he thinks, and then he sinks in with relish. It’s exquisite, morbid, chocolaty, fecal, like falling in a dirty corral, and the overpowering smell of oil evaporates from the surface of his bath into his nostrils that reawaken from the coma. Rivulets of rusty oil run from his body as he plonks and plunks at the wet tar with his fingers, a strange hard bebop of bass lines and key changes, vaguely scratchy, tinged with shredded dinosaur and a compost of ancient plants. He feels an ambiguous ray-like warmth emanating from it, toasting his skin, warming his joints, penetrating to the marrow, his nerves and lymph purring, a resiny treat, an oozing, thermal massage as if Wyatt has fallen among a harem of beguiling concubines.
“So this is what it means to relax,” he says to his own bent reflection on the surface of the oil, a swirling film of hallucinogenic color. Wyatt’s being surged with a love for himself that he would normally push aside as pure baloney. Blessed in his solitary al fresco hammam, free of the unseemly petting of Arab men and boys, he frolics, stands and dances an awkward slippery country jig, turns the spigots on and off like castanets and using his thighs for bongos. He wrestles himself back into the turgid black liquid, wishing that he had one of Toby’s toys, something other than the dull spear between his legs with which to play. He tosses the jockeys onto the tarp and they splat down with a satisfactory, naked wallop.
Then comes the trial.
He gathers a breath, slides his hairy back down the tub, kicks out his legs, closes his eyes into prunes and submerges into the black unguent. Listening for some ancient ancestor pulverized and liquefied into no more than a guiding voice, the oil trickles in his orifices, runs through his ears into his throat into his belly and lungs and he splutters back to the surface, vomiting a black slick over the side.
If a death like this can’t restore him, he’s uncertain what could.
Blue slippery footprints lead from the tub to the strange black zombie, Wyatt lashing himself with a torn drop sheet splattered with paint. He seizes a brush and rubs, bleaching himself from black to umber, grabbing handfuls of rags to soak up the annealing globs of oil, achieving an effect far dirtier than cleaner, everything from the yard gathering on him: iridescent beetles, bursts of pollen, larvae and bluebottles, an itinerant plastic bag, buttons and rivets, matches and receipts, ash, lint, tacks, moths and gum.
“What sticky stuff,” he says as if he doesn’t know what a gusher can do to a rig’s equipment and quarters, backtracking to the garage for the turpentine, light on his feet, prepared to slip. On the cement he douses himself in stinging turpentine and works off the nuggets congested around his hairs and bound in the creases of his skin. He resorts to gasoline when that runs out and his skin becomes one irritated glistening aroused organ as he performs the tedious task, contorted like he’s hunting ticks, and he’s thankful for the high walls of his premises concordant with the Arab wish for privacy that even the Italian architects of his house had respected.
The vapors rise from him in such strength and quantity it’s as if Wyatt is no more than a mirage, waiting in the sun for the fumes to evaporate so he can have a smoke.
Brassy, confident, impatient, he bangs on the empty oil drum and the rich, bass reverberations gong into his warm, churning guts.
“Who says I’m a loser,” he says to the garden, half expecting bleachers to have been erected around his impromptu ritual and a ticket seller holding back the crowds at his gate.
Wyatt feels content and in control, and his absolutely unnatural sense of venality and greed, the sheer self-interest that had led him to secure a billionaire’s nest egg through deceit, has been transformed into an altruistic desire to make and do good. His silly Royal Baby is crystallized before him like folly; he even smiles at the probability his brilliant, and perhaps bogus, project has been hijacked by Colonel Candy. Yet Wyatt does feel superb. He’s anaesthetized, disinfected and practically reborn. His senses are filled with a fresh, focused sharpness. His nose feels firm and new, revived from its spongy, jejune state.
Postponing his by now obsessive wish for a cigarette, fearing self-immolation and waiting for the inevitable, Wyatt adds one last treatment.
Just a tablespoon.
He measures it out, daps his pinky in the spoon, bending the reflection mirrored on its watch-like surface, the palms, the sun, the clouds, the buildings, his curious face, and then lightly smears some inside his nostrils. He snorts a beat, steps forward, lifting the spoon upward, meeting it with the thrust of his chin as he opens wide and trickles the crude oil into the pit of his mouth.
He gags at first, then lets it settle. It tastes like forgotten clothes and seams of coal. He sloshes it back and forth and rinses it deeper into his cavity as more layers of flavor emerge from the volatile liquid having traveled through burial grounds and ancient seas and been refined by the molasses of time. He holds it down, then swallows, his stomach opening and rebelling, more bitter than castor oil, definitely not glycerin, but something savory and sweet, too, like a well-greased bacon sandwich accompanied by an odd spongy alertness gathering between his eyes.
Examining the sandy outlines of his feet, scraping off the last tar balls, Wyatt vanishes into the house, knowing he can break the voluntary curfew and contact Ali Biba. He must traverse the desert to the landscape where it all could play beyond the wildest of oilhog dreams, Wyatt riding the refreshed jumbo smile mounted on his face and needing the utmost precision to manage his tasks and his ego.
Hostage to Candy, Wyatt’s very life hinges on an ability to read geologic time in the clues and scents of the unmapped reservoirs farting under the continent’s perpetual swamps, squeezed by unstable ranges and the lungs of the savannahs, an ominous hut daubed with his fears and joys, to be and not to be Adam on the haunting, liminal stage of diurnal song and nocturnal language.
He finds himself a space on the leather couch to contemplate the solemn heaviness of time, unjust yet so powerful. Wyatt carefully wraps himself up in a clean cotton sheet, pours a whiskey but never finishes it, slumbering well into the American Jazz hour, Coltrane’s tough chops crackling through the sand.
While he sleeps, a drop of oily red liquid creeps from his nose, gradually worms down his pulsing neck, following his contours to dry like a greasy puddle over his heart.
Up next: Lady Be Good
He can’t decipher the graffiti scrawled on his gate. Hostile, he guesses, judging from the colophon: a scimitar dripping with black blood under the Arabic glyph. The driveway’s sticky with bomblets of dates and the shrapnel of pomegranates. The rotten fruit smells alcoholic, illicit.
Wyatt screws at the fuses mounted on one wall of the house. A small dune of sand slopes at the foot of the front door, his key crunches in the sandy lock, and the Benghazi house flickers to life on low battery. He ducks in, fumbles for the switches on the walls, the temporary maladjustment of moving from one place to another.
Wyatt peruses the sad, silent house colonized by sand but weirdly free of scorpions, snakes or spiders. The grit gnaws at his bare soft feet released from the sauna of the boots in which he had traveled for two days. Nonetheless, he’s rejuvenated to be back, happy to have skipped London and his monster-in-law. Yes, Wyatt has returned to Libya full of brawn, excited by the prospect of his great gamble, yet just shrewd enough to be worried about the phlegmatic politics of Colonel Candy.
He deserves congratulations in a way. He fells the occupiers one after another: Italians, Jews, Americans, and British, all exorcized by the political voodoo of his loony regime and filling the souks with their unwanted belongings. Candy beats his hairy silver chest and his rhetoric rebounds across the great oil drum of the region. His voice carries across the Sahara, slips through the bush of the Sahel, and arrives with vigor in the tropics.
Young ambitious men answer back, electrified by an odd-shaped ball of postcolonial independence that they sew from rubber and fiber and fill with spongy bullets. It passes from throne to prison, from stool to barracks, everyone trying to hang on, as erratic and unpredictable as its secret master, Candy. Without judging who’s Mandela or Amin, Candy is helping his proxies’ struggles across the continent. He has no qualms honoring awful men.
Keen to display his power, he hosts the Arab Summit in Tripoli and Candy’s obliged to appear as larger-than-life, with a cache of victories against the scourge of the capitalists. He introduces a Suez Tax on oil shipments, dents Poseidon’s revenues, and talks about an oil embargo. He suggests annexing Egypt in brotherly union and has invited the Russians to take over the American and British bases. To prove the point of what he can achieve, Candy has driven through a Poseidon housing estate in a tank. Yet he can’t be too wild; he still has Poseidon to thank for his treasury, and its employees like Wyatt, who inappropriately and mistakenly believing he’s essential to the geopolitical drama, though he’s unsure of exactly for whom.
Wyatt’s a fool and he’s cemented in place, just like the wells flowing in the desert that threaten to strangle not only Libya with their riches but a vast swath of the continent with an easy, sick death.
Sand has choked the house in his absence, coated the furniture, embedded in the carpet, duned on the window sills, impregnated the wardrobes and cabinets, seemingly migrated everywhere as if a gas. He needs a practical cleaner, but he doesn’t want a woman in the house, more than likely the shape of a melon and with a mouth full of moss, but someone who lives like him, on boiled eggs, ketchup, and chopped onions.
Is his indispensable odd-job man Battutu alive?
And would Battutu be willing to come back?
Wyatt steps into his study to scrutinize his papers and maps. Somehow he has forgotten about the objects, violent or ordinary, that are a crystallization of the little disposable time he allows himself when not in Poseidon’s oil fields. The enameled cement floor’s covered by a rug of running gazelles and the room’s decorated with his refined taste in junk: the skull of an oryx, a prize shot in the desert, a curved dagger with a rhino horn handle, coffee grinders, a spent belt of English anti-aircraft shells, a brass ship’s bell, a brace of Arab powder and ball pistols inlaid with ivory, a ship’s compass, a Rommel corps bayonet, ropes of copper keys from the size of a pea to a loaf, Bedouin camel bags swinging from the back of the door, a dented crescent weathervane from a mosque propped in one corner, a slab of red rock chiseled with a prehistoric petroglyph of hippo perched in another, the tattered fin of an American bomber, and a group of kerosene lamps, the smell of evaporated fuel heady and refreshing, on top of a seafarer’s chest marked in black paint with ports of departure and arrival, Liverpool to Hong Kong, somehow stranded halfway, much like Wyatt.
Desperately inert since the trip to Goshen, his proboscis needs stoking.
He studies the drafting table, a mundane but practical affair recycled from Poseidon’s head office probably reduced to skeleton staff. He has no ingenious method to hide the sum of educated guesses sketched on his maps, the plans for a munificent Royal Baby, the living jelly of his ambitions surpass the dirt and chores of his childhood and be a wheeler-dealer.
The pyramid of rolls are in order. He’s set a little trap, draped four of Noemi’s thin black hairs over the pile, and nothing’s disturbed. Without hesitation, he unrolls them, weighs down their corners with sandstone specimens stained with oil. Wyatt slips off his cramped ivory jeans, lifts himself onto the stool, and in one callisthenic movement he crawls onto the table, lowering his nose ever so daintily to the surface of a waxy map, his rump teeter-tottering into the air.
He scratches at Sudan. He pokes at the Central African Republic. He rubs Chad. He plunges his nose into the proven Libyan reserves. Nothing. Not a drop. Not an iota in his detector.
Has his uncanny sense of smell perished?
He sniffs over certainties: Persian Gulf, Arabia, Niger Delta, jumps across the Atlantic to Brazil, then the Gulf of Mexico.
Nothing exudes from the collection. Or less: negative absolute Kelvin.
Large and tumescent, it looms in his mind like a shape with no center and no end, a doughnut.
The maps are blanks and questions whirl in a panic about the slush of his mind. Are these the originals? They certainly appear to be: those are his stickers of dots and dashes where he remembers placing them. Is there something that he isn’t seeing? Something that is there yet invisible? Is Royal Baby merely a pedestrian child, of no special value at all?
He drinks in the air, redolent of mice and dust, and lowers himself, probes the maps again, counting on a deep breath to solve the conundrum. Is his hunch that misplaced? What’s happened? Did he overexpose his nasal appetite? Was he rushing forward too quickly? Did he need sex? Or whiskey? What’s jamming the signals? Should he need to heat the maps up? What rat has betrayed him?
Noemi?
In order to get out?
Wyatt clambers down, unnerved by the failure of his hound and the paranoia exposed beneath his struggle. Fatigue courses through his body, hardening. He treads down the tiled hall to the kitchen and burrows for the whiskey stashed under the sink. He pours a drink and doesn’t bother to sit, not after three days of propellers and bucket seats. He goes to the bedroom and cracks the Samsonite, unpacks the new duds from Talberts, the black boot-cut jeans, the black paisley shirts sewn with white thread and gussied up with rhinestone buttons, and a pair of shimmering black boots. Hardly a traditionalist, but appreciative of the courtly ways of the cowboy, he’s bound to respect the mourning period after the death of his father. He spreads the duds out on the bed that was all his now, his concerns drifting back to Noemi, adamant and pampering herself in London as compensation for her trials in America. Not caring a fig, he guesses as he removes the black outfit to the dusty wardrobe, tosses them among the officious English suits and rodeo regalia, then diving onto the sandy bed, ribbons of fine grit rising around him. He rinses down the last gulp and soon his body makes a putty of sweat and powder.
Wyatt woke with the calls, the holy lyrics wrapping around the neighborhood. Motes of wandering, homeless, almost static sand glow in the light, low and brown, ineffable and indistinct. He’s covered in it.
Standing at the kitchen sink, trying to prepare a coffee before anything else, a cheroot dangling dangerously from his lips, his throat slimy with catarrh, he finds the water loaded with sand. He puts the pot on the stove anyway and swivels the valve on the gas canister.
“Gravity, you sort it out,” he says.
Silicon and quartz has been a vital part of his diet in the desert, as good as cereal almost.
He’s forgotten about the company radio stuck like a wart on the kitchen shelf. It glows forbiddingly when he switches it on.
“Sugar 2,” he says into the microphone, his voice filled with unease. “Sugar 2? Read me, Sugar 1? Roger?”
The message fizzles into nowhere.
The sand’s still suspended in the atmosphere and occupying any space in the ether reserved for radio waves. He’ll have to tramp if he wants any sugar.
Wyatt rushes through his ablutions, abrading more than shaving, slipping on his wrinkled black outfit, stirring the coffee into the boiled sand.
He hardly bothers for the grounds and grains to settle, bolts back the turgid mix, marches to the garage through the drifts, chokes the Beetle and leaves it to warm up, picking up a sandy cluster of dates as he goes back into the house. He peeks at his study, wipes the sweat from his face, remembering how his nose has failed. But he plunks his hat on his head, nonetheless determined, and fills his chest pocket with pencils, grabs his briefcase, fastens a handkerchief over his face and locks. Wyatt pulls apart the gates, reverses the dune buggy, stops at the curb, pulls them shut, drags his goggles over his hat and eyes, registers the two policemen standing to the side of the property in the haze of the sand storm. They whisper to themselves, playing the game of never looking at their subject, though it’s obvious they’re here to report on the cowboy in black on a spree.
He grunts and speeds off, turns on the headlights halfway down the lane, not sure exactly where he’s going or what he’s doing. He’d have to choose between Poseidon or Ali Baba. He laughs. He’s nearly forgotten the oath to be an informant—a “consultant” as Candy had labeled Wyatt’s gopher-like role.
The low visibility didn’t disturb anyone, certainly not anyone endowed with a turban or veil to draw across their eyes. Mint sellers peddle through the streets. Carts of melons and potatoes are parked along the boulevard. Taxis wait in neat ranks. To Wyatt, paranoid yet confident, it seems that his suspicion is correct: most everyone is a spy for Candy’s multi-departmental security apparatus designed to root out foreign influence. The sense of surveillance definitely is not alleviated by colossal plywood cut-outs left along the boulevards since the Arab League Summit: Sadat, Nasser, Arafat, Hussein, Assad, and those presidents from the Sahel whose names tripped him up like Haile Miriam, all of them magnificent in their suits and robes, bestowing good blessings and bloody threats upon the Arab people cowering below, most of all Candy, at the center of the Arab universe and rendered like Gargantua, bloated in scale and magnificence, dwarfing his peers, even the sun, an ominous stained outline in the roiling brown sky.
Security must have eased, Wyatt guesses, not having to stop at a single checkpoint on his way to the ministry. He’s thankful, as it occurs to him that the gun might be in the glove box, which he stretches to open and confirms: the pistol nearly rusted and useless, rescued with oil, grease, and a clean, but a gun nonetheless, incriminating and easily misunderstood. He has been careless and the worry teases him as he drives under the hollow shadows of the construction booming from the ruins of Carthage’s satellite kingdom. But Wyatt’s preoccupied, ominously thinking of the horrible day at the beach when he and his son nearly drowned, which is probably why he’s doing this anyway. Nonetheless, he notes with some irony that the workers aren’t Arabs but Blacks. Wyatt supposes Candy has ordered the Libyans not to work, such is the ruler’s confidence in the oil economy.
He drums his thumbs on the wheel, thrilled to be doing something. His energy surges back, in large part thanks to the cigarettes and coffee, but he feels a bit cocky again.
Wyatt wouldn’t have to go far for Ali Baba, who is far closer than he ever imagines.
He’s greeted by a sterling act of provocation. In his absence, Libya’s National Oil Corporation has erected a new headquarters of glass and steel next to what’s left of Poseidon Oil and Gas. The workers appear to be finishing the top floors, significantly taller than Poseidon’s squat sponge of a building.
Wyatt grins, and then hoots in the car, cackling maniacally, the laughter pushing his hat off such is his sick joy. Why didn’t Candy occupy Poseidon immediately upon declaring the nationalization program? Wyatt presumes that skullduggery at this level requires a sophistication and authority of which he couldn’t really conceive. But why pretend to negotiate, when you could holster a six-shooter to your waist and solve the dispute in the street? Is not Candy the sheriff and Poseidon no more than bandit vermin? Or the other way round? And who’s Wyatt?
He couldn’t tell.
The trident flag hangs flaccidly, impotent and bleached.
“Sugar 1,” he says to himself melodiously as he walks into Poseidon’s reception, his kerchief pulled down his neck, goggles pushed over the bowl of his hat, his new black boots crunching on the marble floor, half-expecting the famous Scot red head, her cleavage, incredible bum, the come-hither toss of her hair.
But for the first time ever, it’s a man, and a Libyan at that.
“Mister Pleasure,” he says, hiding his disappointment, for the Scot had been the absolute pick from his crop of louche company dates with big bums and easy ways; fornication overseas was Poseidon’s way of life. “I’ve an appointment with Dr. Ali Baba.”
The clerk’s hand creaks across the register. No cheeky repartee or clash of eyes, just a narcotic-like silence that dwindles into the oscillating fans, Wyatt coolly waits, afraid and brash, adrenalin scattering in his limbs, accustomed to days of delays, noticing the man’s lapel, dotted with a very familiar, grinning enamel pin.
Oh, Candy’s cool and smooth, a deposit of nefarious sublimating ice in the oil economy’s favorite cocktail. So drunk are his customers by the end of Libyan happy hour that they can’t fathom how he’s stolen their currency, their women, their dignity and honor, their property, and if they aren’t very careful, their lives. In fact, they will thank him, for graciously continuing to make more rounds of lovely viscous flammable drinks. The secret of theft on this scale or any scale: just smile and no one will notice. Candy has absolute foresight as the best and most malignant of witchdoctors melting time and belief together.
Like in the past, the doors swing easily.
Ali Baba shifts his hulk in a leather chair. He sweeps back his hair then extends his tubby hand. A roughly cut mustache squats under his fleshy nose.
“Very nice office, don’t you think?” he says, zest in his voice, savoring the leather chair and broad expanse of desk.
“Sure,” Wyatt says.
Ali Baba’s shirt is decorated with golden gushing derricks and gathered in knots. He troubles the buttons of his jacket and his trousers are too trim for a man of his girth, wedged open obscenely at the zipper. He’s a slob and supposedly a friend.
“Are you Mr. Wyatt, the cowboy?”
“The one and only,” he says. Could he be anyone else but the cowboy dressed for this rodeo, sitting in the gate on the back of this blue bull, praying to Allah to qualify, maybe even win, with just nine seconds to beat the beast and win the belt?
“That right?” Ali Baba admires the buff black-robed American, so virile and healthy.
“I never rope or drive cows,” Wyatt says, “So technically I’m not a cowboy at all.”
Ali’s globular ears are more like chalices than organs and he expects to hear good results, not lies.
“But you’re good with a lasso, no?”
Did he detect an inflection of Russian in the man’s accent, treacly and crude?
“Didn’t you light the airfield with flares and get the plane down to keep your best driller alive?”
“That was one hell of a night.”
“You also have some babies, if my sources are correct.”
Wyatt pats his quiver of maps. “Sure, I like making babies.”
“Now Wyatt, you can’t provoke me with your vulgarity. I’m an Armenian refugee from Palestine, a Christian like you, your brother and your friend.”
“Baku Oil Academy, would that be right?”
“Very astute, Mr. Wyatt. You read some Russian?”
“No, but that’s the most famous school of them all, the granddaddy if you’re going to be a petroleum geologist. Lots of your countrymen are running the show offshore of California and Texas.”
“You don’t say?”
“And if it helps, my great-grandmother was, if I recall, a Divan.”
“Armenians are hardworking.”
“Who knows where we come from, Ali—a couch or an ottoman, eh?”
Ali Baba brushes aside the innuendo and the impulse to laugh. “Well, see, there’s no excuse that we can’t get along, no barriers at all, Mr. Wyatt. Nothing to fear. The Mamaluk’s have been vanquished. And the Ottomans are in retreat. Now only the Jews we have to fear in Jerusalem.”
“If you say.” The man’s unkempt appearance is a ruse, a cultivated bureaucratic disguise, a cover of incompetence, though he’s clever and about as trustworthy as an ill-tempered mule.
“Mr. Wyatt, you have a proposal for Libyan National Oil Corporation?”
“Isn’t this Poseidon Oil and Gas?”
“Times have changed, Mr. Wyatt, I’m sure you’ll acknowledge that. You don’t happen to remember people before profits?”
“I’d have to check with my superiors.”
“I’m your superior,” Ali says, glowering, clenching his teeth, his mouth squeaking like a vice.
“Looks like it’s sewn up then and the baby’s just another doll.”
“Why wouldn’t one monopoly replace another, hmm?”
“Good point. But it’s very un-American.”
“Mr. Wyatt, think about what you proposed to our most imminent brother if you want to talk about patriotism. I would suggest you relax in the meantime. The fields are working just fine without you. As you can see the revolution is almost complete. Only the people’s committees are as yet unmade.”
“Isn’t ‘relax’ a foreign word?”
“How do you say? Kill some time, yes? In our wonderful city of Benghazi.”
“I’m taken off the case?”
“I want you to reconsider. You’ll get a retainer for your administrative leave of course. Think of yourself as underemployed.”
“Without me, you’ve nothing.”
“There you’re wrong, Mr. Wyatt. Now, if you’re going to waste my time, I’ll have to excuse you.”
“Dr. Baba, don’t you want to see my maps?”
“No, Wyatt,” he says, his tone stretched of patience.
“You see it’s my nose…. My honker is out of whack. I can’t find Royal Baby without it.”
“Imagine, Wyatt, there’s a wonderful spa in Azerbaijan, where the patients soak in tubs of naphthalene. Cures everything, especially the nose. If you’re as enterprising as rumored, and with so much free time, try it at home. We’ll radio you once you’re all fixed. You can go.”
“Yes, Dr. Baba, I’ll expect your call. ”
He’s being cut off, quite rudely sliced off from the mother corporation without so much a word of warning! It’s sobering. Abandoned. Orphaned. Discarded in the reeds, without a raft and without a god, he’s just one more pawn to be sacrificed to a great strategy.
Wyatt slumps into his car.
What a blow. If he hasn’t been outright dismissed, he’s at least been put on hold. They know. So what that he’s never been careless or carefree with his plans. They’ve managed to turn off the spigot to his very own nose, his dowser and detector rolled into one. Candy’s far too intelligent and Wyatt must have grossly underestimated the man. Inadvertently, he’s boasted about his secret without even naming his price. Most infuriating is Baba Ali, so miserable in his appearance, who commandeered the meeting with such apparent rank. The tables have turned every which way but in his favor. There are no familiar colleagues to query him about his trip home, the reason for his black clothes, the health of his son, about whom he had been looking forward to sharing a joke. No, he’s just another parasite riding on the supply side and he feels awful.
With Noemi nursing in London, he doesn’t have much to do at home and restlessness tears him apart. He has no business living in his pajamas like a Libyan, tooting a hookah and making eyes, rubbing his worry beads, a coffee and pastry on his table under the awning of his local café at his station on the cushions and daybed. Yet it wouldn’t be the first time to be a bachelor again, under self-imposed house arrest. The police or their spies surely rest on the other side, the register of their conversation passing over the wall, but that’s nothing to fret about. Wyatt’s benign, harmless, no more trouble than a worm.
Dressed in a threadbare cowboy shirt and dirty jeans tucked into his stockman’s boots, depressed, native as far as the growth of his beard, ennui prevails in his half-hearted quest for order. His orders to a local boy are chopped up in half-words passing through the iron slot in the gate where he pays a few piasters extra for kebabs, pitas and tobacco. He accepts them with no guarantees of oleander, datura or other malicious seeds of witchcraft being sewn in the deliveries. Wyatt suspects he’s immune to hocus-pocus.
He busies himself cleaning but it’s inconsequential. Sandy funnel clouds rule in the colonial house. Attempts to dust and polish are investments in wasting time. The sand multiplies and returns, as his attention turns to the outer premises. Hidden by a cinderblock wall, its top covered in mortar spiked with broken glass, he takes off his shirt and mows then fertilizes the lawn; he scours the driveway of the fruity detritus until the concrete glistens. Improvising a harness, he prunes the date palms of their fruits and dead fronds, and for a diversion makes syrup from the ripest pomegranates and the mangos are also within reach.
Later, breaking for coffee and a cavalcade of smokes, he drafts a report to the London office, but in the intermittent days he doesn’t bother to send it such is his malaise and belief it’ll be intercepted. Instead, he waits for news, a wire or the blissful call over the CB radio, but nothing, no post at all, no messages in the information blackout. The airwaves, like the phone, are dead, except for the chanting of the muezzin and the rhetoric of Colonel Candy stirring the miasma of intrigue. He frets: did no one care? What has happened to Poseidon? Has the great god of oil been wrestled to the ground and suffocated in Candy’s clutches?
He has zero to lose.
With the help of an oil merchant, contacted through an obsequious series of notes dispatched to the souks, he procures a barrel of crude, 64 gallons of sweet oil. An Arab delivers it at dawn in a beat up barrel sprayed with the Poseidon logo, the man’s donkey wheezing and trembling outside Wyatt’s gate as the barrel is rolled into his compound.
Once he’s taken the delivery, Wyatt revisits his study, but there is no scent lingering among the maps, just the flat inertness of mites, skin and dirt. He considers that hardly noticeable trace of ions an achievement. But the search in his reference books has cast a large amount of doubt on the resemblance of Libyan crude to the magic Azeri substance. He sighs. Even without the exact recipe for naphthalene, he was willing to try any goop of Ali Baba’s persuasion.
After spreading a tarp across the lawn and dragging his bathing vessel into place, Wyatt leans the barrel toward the bathtub scavenged from a defunct Italian Hotel. The liquid’s glassy black yet not black at all, rather blue, then red and green simultaneously, nearly brown, but then also yellow, golden, like a bruise, a very emotional color filled with undecipherable tidings. He leaves the black bath to warm in the sun.
Wyatt searches in the garage among his tools for a pair of torn jockey shorts nominally used for polishing tarnished brass and he wrestles them on. Without an attendant in the bathing area, his temporary Baku, he arranges a flask of turpentine, a covey of brushes and some torn drop sheets around the area, in addition to a little footstool and a new bar of olive soap. With a caution bordering on tenderness, he dipped a toe into the liquid, thinner than he imagines, tepid, not nearly as viscous as what he thinks, and then he sinks in with relish. It’s exquisite, morbid, chocolaty, fecal, like falling in a dirty corral, and the overpowering smell of oil evaporates from the surface of his bath into his nostrils that reawaken from the coma. Rivulets of rusty oil run from his body as he plonks and plunks at the wet tar with his fingers, a strange hard bebop of bass lines and key changes, vaguely scratchy, tinged with shredded dinosaur and a compost of ancient plants. He feels an ambiguous ray-like warmth emanating from it, toasting his skin, warming his joints, penetrating to the marrow, his nerves and lymph purring, a resiny treat, an oozing, thermal massage as if Wyatt has fallen among a harem of beguiling concubines.
“So this is what it means to relax,” he says to his own bent reflection on the surface of the oil, a swirling film of hallucinogenic color. Wyatt’s being surged with a love for himself that he would normally push aside as pure baloney. Blessed in his solitary al fresco hammam, free of the unseemly petting of Arab men and boys, he frolics, stands and dances an awkward slippery country jig, turns the spigots on and off like castanets and using his thighs for bongos. He wrestles himself back into the turgid black liquid, wishing that he had one of Toby’s toys, something other than the dull spear between his legs with which to play. He tosses the jockeys onto the tarp and they splat down with a satisfactory, naked wallop.
Then comes the trial.
He gathers a breath, slides his hairy back down the tub, kicks out his legs, closes his eyes into prunes and submerges into the black unguent. Listening for some ancient ancestor pulverized and liquefied into no more than a guiding voice, the oil trickles in his orifices, runs through his ears into his throat into his belly and lungs and he splutters back to the surface, vomiting a black slick over the side.
If a death like this can’t restore him, he’s uncertain what could.
Blue slippery footprints lead from the tub to the strange black zombie, Wyatt lashing himself with a torn drop sheet splattered with paint. He seizes a brush and rubs, bleaching himself from black to umber, grabbing handfuls of rags to soak up the annealing globs of oil, achieving an effect far dirtier than cleaner, everything from the yard gathering on him: iridescent beetles, bursts of pollen, larvae and bluebottles, an itinerant plastic bag, buttons and rivets, matches and receipts, ash, lint, tacks, moths and gum.
“What sticky stuff,” he says as if he doesn’t know what a gusher can do to a rig’s equipment and quarters, backtracking to the garage for the turpentine, light on his feet, prepared to slip. On the cement he douses himself in stinging turpentine and works off the nuggets congested around his hairs and bound in the creases of his skin. He resorts to gasoline when that runs out and his skin becomes one irritated glistening aroused organ as he performs the tedious task, contorted like he’s hunting ticks, and he’s thankful for the high walls of his premises concordant with the Arab wish for privacy that even the Italian architects of his house had respected.
The vapors rise from him in such strength and quantity it’s as if Wyatt is no more than a mirage, waiting in the sun for the fumes to evaporate so he can have a smoke.
Brassy, confident, impatient, he bangs on the empty oil drum and the rich, bass reverberations gong into his warm, churning guts.
“Who says I’m a loser,” he says to the garden, half expecting bleachers to have been erected around his impromptu ritual and a ticket seller holding back the crowds at his gate.
Wyatt feels content and in control, and his absolutely unnatural sense of venality and greed, the sheer self-interest that had led him to secure a billionaire’s nest egg through deceit, has been transformed into an altruistic desire to make and do good. His silly Royal Baby is crystallized before him like folly; he even smiles at the probability his brilliant, and perhaps bogus, project has been hijacked by Colonel Candy. Yet Wyatt does feel superb. He’s anaesthetized, disinfected and practically reborn. His senses are filled with a fresh, focused sharpness. His nose feels firm and new, revived from its spongy, jejune state.
Postponing his by now obsessive wish for a cigarette, fearing self-immolation and waiting for the inevitable, Wyatt adds one last treatment.
Just a tablespoon.
He measures it out, daps his pinky in the spoon, bending the reflection mirrored on its watch-like surface, the palms, the sun, the clouds, the buildings, his curious face, and then lightly smears some inside his nostrils. He snorts a beat, steps forward, lifting the spoon upward, meeting it with the thrust of his chin as he opens wide and trickles the crude oil into the pit of his mouth.
He gags at first, then lets it settle. It tastes like forgotten clothes and seams of coal. He sloshes it back and forth and rinses it deeper into his cavity as more layers of flavor emerge from the volatile liquid having traveled through burial grounds and ancient seas and been refined by the molasses of time. He holds it down, then swallows, his stomach opening and rebelling, more bitter than castor oil, definitely not glycerin, but something savory and sweet, too, like a well-greased bacon sandwich accompanied by an odd spongy alertness gathering between his eyes.
Examining the sandy outlines of his feet, scraping off the last tar balls, Wyatt vanishes into the house, knowing he can break the voluntary curfew and contact Ali Biba. He must traverse the desert to the landscape where it all could play beyond the wildest of oilhog dreams, Wyatt riding the refreshed jumbo smile mounted on his face and needing the utmost precision to manage his tasks and his ego.
Hostage to Candy, Wyatt’s very life hinges on an ability to read geologic time in the clues and scents of the unmapped reservoirs farting under the continent’s perpetual swamps, squeezed by unstable ranges and the lungs of the savannahs, an ominous hut daubed with his fears and joys, to be and not to be Adam on the haunting, liminal stage of diurnal song and nocturnal language.
He finds himself a space on the leather couch to contemplate the solemn heaviness of time, unjust yet so powerful. Wyatt carefully wraps himself up in a clean cotton sheet, pours a whiskey but never finishes it, slumbering well into the American Jazz hour, Coltrane’s tough chops crackling through the sand.
While he sleeps, a drop of oily red liquid creeps from his nose, gradually worms down his pulsing neck, following his contours to dry like a greasy puddle over his heart.
Up next: Lady Be Good
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